October 6, 2005
Paco de Onís and Peter Kinoy
"Fear, Truth and the Documentary" Presentation with Clips
Transcript – Peter Kinoy and Paco de Onis class lecture
Paco de Onis and
Peter Kinoy were the Center for Social
Media's Filmmakers in Residence during the Human Rights Film Series
in 2005. In their public lecture, they outlined the challenges of
independent production and distribution of social issue documentaries
using their film State of Fear as a case study. The making
of State of Fear and the testimonies at the truth commission
hearings in Peru, intensified the filmmakers' understanding of the
power of images in conveying a personal experience and reality to
an audience. State of Fear was screened at American University
in October 2005 as part of the Center for Social Media's Human
Rights Film Series.
What is independent production? What do we mean by social issue
documentaries?
Kinoy: We plan to use the latest film we've produced, State
of Fear, as a case study to look at all of the different aspects
that take place, from beginning to end, in trying to bring a social
issue documentary to light--in this case a fairly high end documentary,
a documentary that a large amount of technical skill, research and
obviously money have gone into. In order to set the mood for this,
we'd like to show you the first couple of minutes of State of
Fear to give you a feeling of the film.
Click here to watch the clip>>
Here are the first two questions that we think are significant:
What is independent production? We've come to define
independent production as production where the filmmakers get to
decide what content to include and what form the film is going to
be in. Within that it's very important that we have editorial control,
that no one else is saying you should make it this way or don't
talk about that talk about something else. Independence is very
difficult to achieve when you need a lot of resources to make a
film because a lot of those resources are controlled by commercial
entities that, for one reason or another, want to have some input
and some control over what you're doing. Obviously there is always
a struggle, a struggle between the need for resources and the desire
for independence.
The second question is What do we mean by social issue documentaries?
Documentaries that stand opposed to looking at the world
only through an individual. We're interested in looking at larger
societal questions. In other words "How does a society decide on
the course that it sets for the people within that society?" "How
do people within a society have any affect on the course of the
larger body politick?" These questions unfortunately are not the
core of our education as citizens and we really believe they have
to be.
We feel there is a very important and critical place for social
issue documentaries in the health of a democracy. How can you have
a healthy democracy which relies on a spectrum of dialogue around
issues if you don't have really engaging information put out there?
We make films that are not only factual, but are going to engage
your entire intellect. The intellect is not just a realm of ideas.
It's a combination of emotion and ideas. Film is perfectly situated
to illicit these emotions and ideas because it has picture and sound,
and it's able to evoke within the human brain a memory response
that makes you understand things in a very deep way. This is the
reason we work in this medium. Film and video is the medium of communication
in our age. There's a very powerful tool in your hands and it's
a tool that can be used in many different ways.
Onís: The making of each film is a unique story. Even though
Skylight Pictures has been making films for 25 years, each new film
presents new challenges and difficulties. It's not like the doors
just open and people write checks and say "here" and just go.
Our main love is social issue documentaries. But I know that a lot
of you are going to go out into the working world at some point
and wonder, "How am I going to make a living doing this?" We also
do some works for hire for National Geographic or Discovery once
in a while--while we're in the middle of preparing and developing
these films--in order to survive.
Here's the story of State of Fear. State of Fear originated
in January of 2002 not too long after 9/11. A filmmaker friend of
ours, Gail Pellet, who worked on the South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission film known as Facing the Truth with Bill Moyers,
said that one of the members of the Truth Commission had set up
an organization in New York called the International Center for
Transitional Justice (ICTJ). They were telling her about this Peruvian
truth and reconciliation commission that had been formed and what
a unique truth and reconciliation commission it would be because
it was the first one in Latin America to have public hearings. They
were going to interview people who'd been affected by this violence
in Peru, a psycho-violence that lasted 20 years, and it was all
going to be public.
Skylight Pictures has made many films in Latin America and this
really interested us. Gail - who does not have a history with Latin
America and doesn't speak Spanish - thought that we would be interested.
We were. We went and met with the people at the ICTJ, and they explained
more about the truth commission to us. We decided we'd be interested
in exploring that to make a film.
To explore an idea like that you really have to go to the place
and scout it. You have to get a real sense of what you're getting
into, and for that you need development money. So we went to the
Ford Foundation and told them that we were interested in doing this.
We also knew that the Ford Foundation had given funding to the truth
commission, so we figured that they would have an interest in a
film that would preserve the work of the truth commission forever.
They agreed. They gave us some seed money to explore it.
Pam and I went down to the truth commission hearings. We were looking
at it for: Who would be the characters? How would the story be told?
How do you tell a story? The truth commission was a podium set up
with 12 truth commissioners and a person giving testimony. How long
can you show that on a screen to make a film? You have to find other
filming devices. We decided we could make a film out of this, but
what really interested us was that the stories we were hearing in
Peru and in the period that the truth commission was examining were
essentially a war on terror, as the Peruvians described it themselves.
This had incredible relevance to what was happening up here in the
United States. This was the Spring of 2002, and we thought: This
story is not just about Peru; this is a story about humanity and
it's really going to have relevance in the United States at this
time.
We had a little PD-150 camera. I'm not a shooter, neither is Pam.
We shot some interviews, we took photos, and put together a trailer
to show the Ford Foundation and other potential funders. We had
now developed an idea about a film that had a sort of parallel line
to what's going on here in the U.S.
The picture is worth a thousand words - The value of trailers
in fundraising for films.
Kinoy: One thing we've learned is the old saying: "The picture
is worth a thousand words." You can talk yourself blue in the face
and people don't understand what you're saying. But show them something
and they suddenly get it, and they say, "Aha! That's what you're
talking about."
Onís: Right after our first shoot we barely had anytime to
put anything together. Peter masterfully edited a 20 minute trailer.
We went to the IFP in New York [Independent Feature Project] conference
where we were inside something called "No Borders," a half hour
of one-on-one face time with different commissioning editors from
television channels around the world. The first one we just talked
for a half hour and we could tell that we just weren't getting through.
We live in New York, so I ran home got this little portable TV with
a VCR in it and went back. At the next meetings we just plunked
the VCR on the table, put the tape in, let them watch it for 20
minutes, and then we talked for 10 minutes. That was much more effective.
We got a lot of interest.
Kinoy: When Pam and Paco came back from their very first
scout, we knew we had to put a trailer together, but we were faced
with this problem: We really didn't have very rich material to put
in this trailer. Basically what we had to work with was still photographs
and the little bit of video that they shot. We had to figure out,
with this paltry material, how are we going to communicate to these
foundations what the film is going to be about? This was our attempt
to do it.
(Clip coming soon!)
That was the very first trailer that we put together, and you can
see we had to go to great lengths to figure out how to inject the
message of what the film was going to be about. We picked the device
of interviewing Pam, the director, and putting her there on the
screen. One of the reasons we did that is that more and more people
look at films as being director driven and they want to hear from
the director. Even though our company is a collective and we develop
these films very collectively, we have to put somebody forward as
the director of the film. That's how people in the industry relate
to it. So we put her there, explaining what the film was going to
be about. I think it helped with Ford?
Onís: Yes. We were trying in the trailer to show the range
of characters and the concepts that were going to go into the film.
A lot of the characters did stay in the film. A couple didn't.
We got some more funding from the Ford Foundation, enough to go
and do our first shoot, but we still had to keep looking for funding.
Some filmmakers prefer to have all the money in place before they
start. We feel we can't do that because so much time passes; you
just have to take a chance and go. We went down. We did our first
shoot. When we came back, we had material. We like to do documentaries
with two shoots: a primary shoot, then let time pass, and go back
and catch the same story a year down the road or longer, depending.
We were planning to have a second shoot even though we didn't have
the money yet.
We did our first shoot and made another trailer. We took the trailer,
not only to other foundations, but also to the "pitching" forums
at the Toronto Hot Docs Film Festival and the International Documentary
Festival in Amsterdam [IDFA]. They accept about 40 projects in the
period of two days. Each filmmaking team gets to pitch in front
of a table of people who actually buy programming. It's very direct
and there's no beating around the bush. Usually you're at a stage
where you're looking for funding to help you finish your film. You
have to have a broadcaster on board; you have to have to have at
least 25% of your budget in place, but not more than 75%. So it
can't be a finished film.
Hot Docs in 2003 was the first showing of this trailer. You only
have 7 minutes to actually pitch and then 8 minutes for back-and-forth
with the commissioning editors and filmmakers. We thought: "What
are we going to do with our 7 minutes?" We made a trailer which
was 5 minutes and left 2 minutes for talking.
Kinoy: It was the only trailer there that got a big round
of applause. I want you to look at the genesis of the ideas from
the first trailer we just looked at to the one we're about to see.
How are the ideas clarified? How are they developed? How are they
changed from the first trailer to this trailer? The process of making
a film is a process of learning. You're clarifying your own ideas
about what the film is going to be like. One thing you'll see is
much more exquisite images. It was the skill of Paco and Pam to
find a great Peruvian cinematographer (Juan Duran), someone who
really understood Peru. At the time, he was doing a lot of feature
films, but also some documentaries, and he agreed to work as the
cinematographer on State of Fear. It really elevated the
film. Think about the images in the trailer you just saw to what
you're about to see I think you'll see a big difference.
Onís: Just one comment: This trailer's a little bit updated
because we're going to use it now as a trailer before our showings
in New York at the film forum and other theatrical showings. So
it has some awards that the film has won already and honestly we
didn't have at the time. Also, our entire crew was Peruvian, other
than Pam and me.
Click here to watch the clip>>
 Kinoy:
Paco and Pam found a Peruvian musician who's actually a shaman who
specializes in music made by pre-Inca instruments and he agreed
to work with us. As we were editing we used previously recorded
music of his, and then as the project progressed he composed music
for the project.
Onís: Another thing we should talk about is: How do you choose
the characters? Some testimonies were very personal and tragic,
as all of them were, but they didn't transcend that. Others really
went beyond that, like Romero who says man is part human, part animal.
What happened to him became something that he then transposed to
his community and his students, because he's a school teacher.
We heard about a marine officer who had given a private testimony
to the truth commission. He wouldn't do it publicly, but the truth
commission told us about him and they said, "We can't introduce
you to him, but we'll ask him if he's willing to talk to you and
if he says 'yes' then you guys can meet on your own." He did say
"yes" and we met. At first he was afraid and that's why in the first
trailer he's there but with black over his face. He said he would
only do it if we didn't show his full face even in the trailer which
wasn't going to be broadcast. Of course we agreed. We never tried
to jump on characters or do things if they're not willing. We talk
to them first. Our first meetings are never with a camera. We get
to know them, we get their confidence, and then they talk to us
in confidence. That way we develop relationships with all the characters.
Kinoy: The second trailer was very successful. National Geographic
International came on board because they saw this trailer at Hot
Docs. They approached Paco and said, "We've got to talk about this
film. We have a new series. We want to invest in this film for our
series. What we're willing to do is buy the international cable
and satellite rights for this film, and give you basically half
your production money or close to half of it in exchange for those
rights." That is what really enabled us to go the next step in producing
the film. Up to that point, even though we had 60 hours of footage,
we hadn't been able to start editing the film.
This film was edited backwards. We did all the trailers before we
ever began editing the film. That presents a problem because the
very condensed style that you developed to get information across
in 5 minutes is not going to be the same style that you're going
to use in a feature length film. We had a psychological problem,
to break away from a style that we had become wedded to in making
these trailers; to really expand it.
One part of the challenge was how to tell 25 years of Peruvian history
in 90 minutes in a way that was going to be compelling and understandable
for an audience that didn't know anything about it. The other challenge
was making sure the film could transcend the Peruvian experience
and present ideas that people could relate to even if they weren't
interested in Peru; something that they could take away from the
film into their own lives. What are the devices we're going to use?
As Paco said, the truth commission was just a bunch of people sitting
up on a podium. How were we going to bring that to cinematic life?
How could we capture the essence of what was being described and
discovered by the truth commission and the emotion that was released
in these public hearings? How could we put that into a cinematic
experience for people?
One of the ways a film develops is through your experience in the
field. When Paco and Pam went to Peru and started filming, even
from the first scout, it began influencing the way that we were
thinking structurally about this film. On the very first scout they
just had a little digital still camera along with the PD-150 which
is a medium range video camera. The film, in the end, was shot with
a much higher format digital camera. It was called an Icagomy 7
which has much bigger chips and holds about 9 times more digital
information per frame than the 150. It has what's called a native
[theatrical] 16-9 frame. That was the decision we made to go with
that 16-9 rather than the 4-3 regular television format. We felt
it would be more cinematic and it would be more appropriate to the
grandeur of the Peruvian landscape which was just immense.
Onís: At that table of commissioners from around the world
the last one that we expected to be interested in our film was National
Geographic, because I was thinking National Geographic U.S. I didn't
realize that it's actually divided into U.S. and international.
So it's ironic that the commissioning editor of National Geographic
International wanted our film. It ended up being the opening of
a new series that they started this year in July called No Borders.
The film had aired in July in 154 countries, but has not aired in
the United States. National Geographic U.S. is not interested in
the film. So you know unexpected things happen along the way.
I think Hot Docs is where the Sundance Documentary Fund really got
interested and they in fact called us afterwards and said, "Aren't
you going to submit a proposal?" We said, "Oh, I guess we will."
So Sundance Documentary Fund also contributed to the funding of
the film. Then there's another organization here in Washington called
the United States Institute of Peace which provided us with funding
as well.
Swimming Against the Tide Kinoy: One of the things
that we had to struggle with was certain preconceptions that people
have and trendy notions that they have about documentaries. You
often have to swim against the tide when you do these things. There
are certain kinds of documentaries that are quite in favor with
festivals and those documentaries are kind of hand held, shaky,
personal stories that are called character-driven. Basically it's
the Hollywood model. You pick one character that's going to carry
your story and you build the story dramatically around that one
character.
We knew that we couldn't have one character that was going to carry
such an immense and wide story. We also knew that we wanted characters
whose lives directly intersected with important moments in that
25-year history so that they could tell pieces of the history from
very deep personal experience. So, we presented these proposals
where we talked about having 2 dozen characters and people just
said, 'You're nuts. You're crazy. We're not going to fund a film
like that. No one's going to relate to it. You must have a character-driven
film. Don't you know how to make movies?'
We've been making movies for a while. We know how to make movies,
but you cannot rely on any one formula. There is no one formula
to tell a story. Every single story has to find a formula that's
unique to that story and a mode and a method to tell that story
that makes sense for the information that you want to impart and
the material that you have available.
Onís: There are trends and fashions amongst commissioning
editors of certain types of films and it changes through the years.
If the film you happen to be making goes against that, you're swimming
upstream. Another thing we'd run into is: 'Oh we're making a film
based on the Peruvian truth commission,' 'Oh truth commission. That's
been done. That's South Africa. We already saw something about truth
commission,' they say. 'One truth commission, that's enough.' You
get that and that can be very discouraging. And you think 'Well,
I'm not going to mention truth commission the next time I talk about
this film. We'll just have to sneak it in on them in some other
ways.'
Kinoy: There are a lot of false leads and false avenues that
you pursue as you're trying to get funding. We've told you about
some of the successes, but there were a lot of failures in terms
of people that we approached. There's an organization called ITVS
(Independent Television Service). Fifteen years ago Pamela and I
came down and testified before Congress to help set up ITVS. It's
a very important funding organization. It works now by a very complex
peer panel review where you go through four stages of review before
you're accepted. You can basically sell them the right to put your
film on public television here in the United States in exchange
for production money. How many times did we apply, two or three?
Onís: Two times. We got to stage three on one and then stage
four on the last one. Very, very time consuming, and not only time
consuming in actually writing the proposal and then the different
stages of it, but waiting to hear back.
Kinoy: We had to cut three different samples for them; three
different samples of different lengths. We did months of work on
those proposals and they never went anywhere. We were encouraged
at every step, 'We love it. We love it.' Then we never got funding.
Onís: It didn't get to the final stage. It made it through
several processes.
Kinoy: Not that it was all for not. We developed some relationships
with people there around the film.
Onís: Plus we should mention, Skylight has received funding
from ITVS in the past. It's not always a dead end. This time it
was.
When You Don't Have Any Actual Footage…Using Archival Material
Kinoy: We're trying to tell a story that took place entirely
in the past. So we had to come up with devices to make the past
seem present, to make the past seem real. These are the three building
blocks that we used in State of Fear: the interview; footage
we shot in the present to represent things; and the use of archival
material.
The use of archival material is obviously critical. It's especially
critical when you can build a very strong resonance between somebody's
story and the images that you're showing. Now obviously the most
clear is when that person has home video of what has happened to
them, and you can show the actual thing. That's usually not going
to be the case. In fact, in Peru we're dealing with very poor people,
people who didn't even have still photographs of themselves for
the most part. So we had to look for archival material that - in
the eyes of the viewer - could represent what they were talking
about. We were really lucky to work with the archival researcher
who had collected all of the archival material for the truth commission.
He knew where everything was in Peru in terms of what material TV
stations had and what independent filmmakers had shot. A lot of
people look at this film and they ask us later, 'Did you recreate
any of that archival material?' It was all material that we found
that was shot at this time.
This next piece is from a story of a woman who, and I don't think
we have her entire story as this clip, but it's the story of a woman
who after the fall of Shining Path, when there was no longer a terrorist
threat, Fujimori tried to maintain his authority by making people
in Peru believe that they were always on alert; that they were on
the equivalent of red or orange or yellow alert, and that they still
had a lot to fear. He rounded up anybody who he felt had any connection
whatsoever to the progressive movement or left in Peru, and a lot
of times people who had nothing to do with it whatsoever, but who
were just caught some how. This clip comes from the story of a woman
who, on the very first day that she went to enroll at university,
was kidnapped by the secret police and subsequently interrogated,
tortured and raped. This is a part of her story. I want you to look
at it really in terms of the use of the archival material.
Click here to watch the clip>>
 How
do you use images in a film? How do you remain truthful to a situation
when you can't really show the exact situation that was going on?
In the film, there is a woman who soldiers are leading in the archival
clip, but that's not her. But looking at it you might make the leap
and think, 'Oh that's her.' Is that a fair thing to do? Is that
a journalistic thing to do? Is that something that's proper to do
in a film?
We make certain decisions as storytellers…how we're going to tell
a story and what devices are we going to use to tell a story. You
can't just do that blindly. You must think about and question what
are the limits in terms of presenting something? We've made certain
decisions about the use of archival material. Other people may not
totally agree with us, but we feel that you can use archival material
to represent a situation even though it's not the exact situation
that the person is speaking about. You have two soldiers dragging
this woman along in the prison courtyard. What she's saying relates
exactly to the image you're seeing; she's talking about them being
masked. She says, 'The little bit I peeked out they were wearing
hoods,' and you see the exact thing. We searched for this footage,
and we finally found footage that was shot in a prison at the same
time that she's talking about. I know for a fact that's not her
because later on in the footage they take the masks off of the woman
and you can see it's not her. Yet it was so similar and must have
happened to so many women that we felt justified in using that material.
We felt that we were not lying about the reality of the situation
that had happened even though that was not her.
I wouldn't have used that part of the story where she talks about
being hooded. I might have used a part of the story where she goes
into more detail about her rape or something like that. But I did
pick out the parts of her story that I felt I could show most cinematically.
I had this really compelling footage of this woman being dragged
through prison and she happened to talk about it. I knew, 'Well
I better have her talk about it then,' because that would just make
it all the more powerful. Yet I don't think that I basically altered
or changed the story that she was telling, but I did put emphasis
on different details in the story based on the footage.
The second shot -- I didn't have a picture of anybody being tortured,
but I picked a picture that I felt was very representative in its
nature. She's behind bars and has this double hood on. It's just
so spooky. Not only does she have the outer hood, they take off
the outer hood and then there's another hood underneath it. For
what? It's just this extra level of craziness. I felt that image
would psychologically resonate with the audience as she talks about
torture.
Then we get to the next images which are more hooded people. These
happen to be the judges. She got pregnant from the rape; when she
was 8 months pregnant, they take her to court, and here are these
hooded judges. I didn't have pictures. I didn't have anything of
her in court. But, they filmed one of these sessions! The camera
actually pans around and gets to the one way mirror, but there's
a man prisoner sitting behind the mirror and not her. So I made
a decision, the first time we edited it the camera panned all the
way around and showed the male prisoner there, and it kind of broke
the illusion. This time I cut it right before it reaches the guy
and then comes to her on camera saying, 'I could only see myself
in the mirror.' That was a decision we made in order to maintain
the psychological illusion that it's her story that's being illustrated.
So those are questions, and they're questions that are going to
come up as you edit: What are the limits of what you do and what
you don't do in telling a story? The next clip that I want to show
you has to do with our feeling that we wanted to universalize the
story; that it was not just going to be a story about Peru. We decided
that we didn't want to go the route of recreating situations from
the past. We felt that was kind of hokey, like a dramatization of
soldiers grabbing somebody or a dramatization of somebody taking
up arms with Shining Path. We wanted to come up with images that
were real, but somehow would resonate for an audience with the kind
of themes that are being talked about at that moment in the film.
The next clip that I'm going to show you is our attempt to do that
in this film. It's a series of four different images.
Click here to watch the clip>>
 Kinoy:
Just to go over what those images were: The first one was that very
low angle shot of the guy sharpening the knife on the stone. What's
being talked about is the anger in the countryside and the beginnings
of the rise of Shining Path. This is a case where we were looking
for an image out of the naturalistic everyday world in Peru, that
Pam and Paco were seeing when they were down there, that could somehow
stand for something. We felt that both the sound of the knife scraping
on the rock, the feeling of the roughness of it, and the potential
violence that's symbolized by the knife all could come into play
in the viewer's mind in terms of relating to what the narrator is
talking about at that point. The second image was the little girl
with the flowers. This was an image that came about because when
I was kid I was fascinated with throwing little sticks in the stream
and watching them float away, and I thought that business of seeing
things float down the river was something universal in kids and
very innocent and child-like. I thought that it might be interesting
to juxtapose an image like that with knowing that children were
being abducted as child soldiers in that situation. Now obviously
none of this material could possibly be confused as dramatization
of that period of time; it looks like it was shot now. So those
are the kind of things that we did. The other things, for instance
the woman standing in the crowd-- one of the ideas that she represents
and stands for is something called "bystander behavior." "Bystander
behavior" is when something terrible is happening and people just
watch and don't do something about it. She describes that a lot
in State of Fear. We asked her to stand very still in this
crowded street and [we] just filmed over a period of time with her
standing still and everybody else passing around her and in front
of her. We had already interviewed her on the first shoot, and we
were looking for ways to illustrate some of what she was talking
about. So that image of her standing there was something that we
did on the final shoot where we already knew the content of what
we wanted her to talk about.
The 360 degree pan in the plaza is a lot more than just a simple
pan. We picked the idea of sunrise in the central plaza and wanted
to show from early dawn through full light in one 360 degree pan
the process of four or five hours in that plaza that symbolizes
"a new day in Peru." But that was the second thing we came up with.
The first one was that we took a little Peruvian boy around Lima
-- it's a desert, there're very different kinds of terrain, and
around Lima there're these huge sand dunes that go on for miles.
It's gorgeous; like some kind of lunar landscape. So, Paco and Pam
took this little boy and they filmed him all by himself walking
up this sand dune. Then they did a 360 degree camera move around
him at the top of the sand dune. In the last shot of the sequence,
you see him walking off down the sand dune, like into the future.
We used this in a rough cut and we showed it to test audiences and
they're saying, 'What was that?' We had other images that were sort
of very stylized that people got totally lost in. We had created
this idea, 'Oh this is a new way of storytelling, how revolutionary,'
but then we played it for people and they totally didn't get it.
What's the bottom line? The bottom line is you're trying to communicate
and if you do something that totally loses your audience, even though
you may be attached to it, it's going against the basic thing you're
trying to do: you're trying to communicate ideas and feelings and
bring an audience to a new place.
Onís: In an independent film it is essential for us to maintain
editorial control and we don't necessarily know where it's going
to broadcast. Nevertheless at a certain point in the editing, at
a rough-cut stage, we do screenings. We do several screenings of
our rough-cut: one for other filmmakers, another for students, and
one for experts on Peru. We got good feedback. We take that feedback
very seriously. We take copious notes, and we're really interested
in finding out how our film is communicating. One of the best ways
to find out is to show it at a stage where you still can change
and get that feedback. That's very, very instructive to us, it's
part of our process.
So if you're working for Discovery or National Geographic or PBS,
they might have somebody there telling you, 'Got to take that out,
[and] put this in.' That's another process. It's their film, they
control it. With us, we do that to ourselves, we expose ourselves.
Some filmmakers say, 'God, I could never do that, it's too painful.'
They're going to take this thing that you love and trash it, and
it happens. We make it a point to expose ourselves to that. We find
that it's to the benefit of the film.
Kinoy: So at this point we had all of our archival material.
We had wonderful music. We're editing the film. We're halfway done
editing. It's August of 2004. We're rushing for the deadline to
submit it to Sundance, and what do we hear? We hear that there's
another film being made about the exact same thing. We didn't know
really what it was about. So we immediately called that filmmaker
[and] said, 'What's your film about? Here's what our film's about.'
This is when the marketplace begins making demands on your production,
and one of the ways, in this case, the marketplace intruded itself
was that we were in competition with another film about a similar
[story].
Onís: Most television stations are not going to show two
films about a similar subject. We knew that. We weren't really ready
to submit to Sundance because our shoot had just ended and it was
just so rough. Sundance is used to looking at rough cuts, but this
was rougher than a rough cut; this was just an assembly. But we
felt compelled to rush it in and the other film did too. The other
film got into Sundance and we didn't. Then we thought, 'oh well,'
obviously it's going to get a lot attention for being in Sundance.
That's going to make things more difficult for us. We were still
looking for completion funds.
We found out that the political perspective of the other film was
practically the opposite of ours. The other film wasn't about the
truth commission at all. It was about Fujimori, it's called The
Fall of Fujimori. It basically portrays Fujimori as kind of
a hero…a misunderstood hero who lost everything in the fight against
terrorism. He sacrificed for his country and then he had to go into
exile. That is the narrative that Fujimori himself has pushed. Because
we are also political filmmakers, we were not happy about Fujimori
getting his narrative out there and people who know nothing about
Peru suddenly seeing a Peru as having this hero who was thrown out
of the country. It was as if Bush, after fighting his war on terror,
was exiled to Australia or something. Bush has that same narrative,
right? 'I'm a hero of the war on terror.' So then we had to figure
out how are we going to deal with this? We actually thought that
since there were two films about the same subject that take such
different points of view, we were hoping that some festivals might
have both films and then have a debate about how does democracy
deal with the problem of terrorism? But we can't get the filmmaker
of The Fall of Fujimori to agree to that. But we already
had some things going like the broadcast around the world with National
Geographic in 154 countries. But we were concerned about the U.S.
audience and so we're out now on the festival circuit and also university
screenings and negotiating for a U.S. broadcast next year.
Kinoy: One of the things you have to remember when you're
making a film is: Who is your core audience? If it doesn't work
for that core audience, then it's not going to work for a larger
general audience. You need those people who really want this film
and really understand this film to help generate the interest in
it so that it can really have a life, a much broader life than just
that core audience. So we thought, 'Well who really is the core
audience for State of Fear?' The core audience was really
the human rights movement in Peru, in the United States and internationally.
So we had to make sure in our distribution that the Human Rights
Movement was going to take up this film, make it their own and use
it.
Onís: We were invited to the Tribeca Film Festival, which
has very quickly become a prestigious film festival. At the same
time, we were invited to the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in
New York. Both of them wanted a premiere. Tribeca has a lot of celebrity
profile prestige, it gets a lot of press, but it has about 200 films.
Unless you are a celebrity or some kind of big buzz is attached
to your film you get lost. Human Rights Watch is a festival that's
been going on for a lot longer than Tribeca, it has an established
international prestige, and it only shows 22 films from all over
the world. They choose ours, and they said they would give us opening
night film.
Kinoy: It wasn't quite as simple as that. They selected the
film, but then we had to ask for it to be the opening night film.
These things are not handed to you in this world in that each step
we've had to fight for every single aspect of distribution.
Onís: We said if we're going to give up Tribeca then you
should give us opening night film, and they said 'Okay, you have
opening night.' That was very important to us. That was a really
important premiere in our hometown. It got tremendous attention
and not only in our hometown, but right after we played there we
got requests from all over the world because a lot of people who
curate film festivals in other places go to the website of Human
Rights Watch to see who they picked and they look at the synopses
of each film. Based on that they get in touch.
Onís: Then, we were invited to the [Human Rights Watch] Traveling
Film Festival which goes all over the country and also in Canada.
There's also an Amnesty International Film Festival, which we're
part of and it's a traveling festival, too. There is an organization
called Cinema Tropical, which focuses on films about Latin America
or Latin American films for U.S. audiences, they also have a circuit.
So we are distributing the film through all these alternative methods,
and universities, for example the Human Rights Series here at American
University. Then, we will just expand on that and eventually we'll
have a U.S. broadcast. We are also making an educational DVD, which
is the film plus a lot of extras that have to do with issues surrounding
the film, which we're also going to distribute ourselves. So we
decided to take the road of self-distribution on this film because
we want to control that distribution, we want to decide how much
emphasis to give to different aspects of it, and we never saw it
as sort of a box office success kind of film. We really want it
to be a long lasting film.
Kinoy: I think independent social issue documentaries can
actually make a difference. In Peru this film is now going to be
translated into two major indigenous languages, Quechua and Shanaka,
languages that no films are ever translated into. It's going to
be used all over that country to really organize and fight for the
kind of conclusions that the truth commission recommended: reparations,
education in the countryside, health care, and the changing of the
conditions that led to the violence originally. So you know it's
going to make a real difference. It may also make a difference in
the thinking of people here as they begin grappling with the whole
issue of how does a state effectively combat terrorism, which is
the underlying subtext of the film State of Fear. The other
reason that it's so important is that there is more and more monopolization
of the news outlets in this country. The spectrum of information
that we're getting in the mass media is more and more narrow.
I'd like to show you this last clip. It's something that happened
in Peru that gives us cause to think. Just to give you a little
background, Fujimori had a right hand man. (Onís: His own Cheney).
Yes his Dick Cheney, Vladimir Montesinos. Montesinos headed up the
secret police in Peru, but it turned out he was also buying every
major player in Peruvian society, and when I say buying I mean literally
buying. He kept secret video tapes of every one of these transactions,
very much like Nixon bugged himself in Watergate. This is a little
bit of that material.
Click here to watch the clip>>
 Kinoy:
Fujimori understood if you want to control a population, control
what they understand about reality. Peru was just moving into the
video age, moving into an age where people really shifted from print
media and radio to television in terms of how they understand what's
going on in the world. Fujimori understood this totally and made
it his first priority that people were going to understand what
he was doing and what was going on in their country through television.
He made sure, in the most blatant way, that the television stations
were going to run his version of reality, and as you saw in the
film [showing secret bribes] those were piles of dollar bills that
were being pushed across the table to the owners of television stations
in Peru.
This is how we understand the world now, even the most sophisticated
of us who try to get news from lots of different sources. Television
is still the vast mediator of public opinion. It's very important
that we continue to look for and find ways to have alternative views
and information put out.
What we're really talking about is the desire to control how people
understand their own history, and this is exactly what Fujimori
tried to do in Peru with his version of history. It's why it took
a truth commission interviewing 17,000 Peruvians to build an alternative
understanding of what had happened during that period of time. We
have to be very vigilant and very careful about what's happening
here because as citizens we're going to make our decisions and decide
what to do, who to vote for, where to put our energy, what kind
of issues to support. We're going to make those decisions based
on available information.
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